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With films like Avatar smashing all box office records, and a massive influx of mega budget 3d films hitting the multiplexes up and down the country, one would be forgiven for thinking that the dawn of 3D as an established film medium has well and truly arrived. Indeed, Jeffrey Katazenburg, one of the co founders of the giant film studio Dreamworks, went even further, publically stating that “2D films are going to be a thing of the past”.

Katzenburg’s predictions seemed to be coming true as the first wave of Post Avatar 3D films such as Alice in Wonderland, Clash of the Titans and Toy Story 3 earned enormous box office revenues. The ‘kerching’ of cash registers and the obvious sounds of hands being rubbed with glee, could be heard emanating from the boardrooms of the various Film Studios. However, by the end of August 2010, the sounds of joy was soon replaced by an air of uncertainty.

Things were not looking too rosy as the next wave of 3D films produced disappointing box office results with films barely breaking even on their 3d screenings. And, to add further salt to the proverbial wound, the latest figures released by the New York Times, has only served to reiterate the belief that the 3d medium is in desperate peril. At its height, an average 3d film was earning 70-100 percent more in cinemas than the equivalent 2d film.

However, the first clear sign of danger came the weekend of June 18, 2010. Toy Story 3 opened with $110.3 million in ticket sales, making it one of the most successful films in history. Yet the Pixar movie’s 3-D screenings contributed relatively little to its dazzling profits. Their per-cinema revenue was at minus 5 percent compared to 2-D showings, the first time in recent history that 3-D had sunk below the break-even point on a film’s first weekend. Six weeks later, Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore opened with $12.3 million in total sales, and a 3-D “bonus” of minus 10 percent. The monster profits from 2009 had all but disappeared by the end of the summer.

Shares in DreamWorks Animation, the studio managed by Jeffrey “2-D films are going to be a thing of the past” Katzenberg,were in free-fall and Shares of RealD, one of the big players in stereo projection technology, have also been in a tailspin, losing 70 percent of their value since May.

It is interesting to note that Coroline, Resident Evil and Tron were all filmed using 3d Cameras and were not cheap 3d Conversions

But the 64 million dollar question is, who is responsible for the alarming slide in the popularity of 3d films.? I believe there are 3 main culprits…

1. Greedy Cinema chains : In the spring of 2010 , Regal, AMC and other large Cinema chains increased the price of 3d films by 20 % in the hope of cashing in on the 3d craze. Accountants Price Waterhouse carried out their own investigation and concluded that the 3d ticket prices were indeed overpriced. They commented that “Industry players risk killing a golden goose by overselling and, in some cases, overpricing the 3-D experience” and in a recent study, over 75% of people interviewed felt that the 3d is not worth the extra £4 per ticket.

2. Greedy Film Studios : The production costs of a 3d film far outweigh those of a conventional 2d film. As a result, the studios are shooting a lot of their films in conventional 2d and then during the post production stage they are converted to 3d. This is a cheap, shoddy method which no doubt creates a sub standard 3d experience for the punter who has forked out top dollar expecting a full 3d experience. James Cameron, the director of Avatar moaned “you got people who are quickly converting films from 2d to 3d, which is not what we did. They’re expecting the same result, when in fact it they will work against the adoption of 3D because they will be putting out an inferior product”

3. Shrewd consumers : A lot of people simply have no interest in watching 3D films, Others have suffered nausea inducing headaches and indeed a recent study suggested that 10 % of the population are actually anatomically incapable of seeing 3D effects.

To suggest that the 3d patient is dead, is a bit premature, but certainly, the post Avatar love affair with 3d has definitely soured. With Spielberg’s TinTin, already released and Scorcese and Peter Jackson, also releasing films in 3d, it will be interesting to see if the patient will make a full recovery.

Is there a Bigfoot on Alaska’s North Slope? One Barrow family thinks so, and it has them worried about a remote cabin property they own about 35 miles south of America’s northernmost community.

Sarah Skin has been camping at the cabin every year for the last half-century. In the last three years, she and her family say they’ve repeatedly seen 10-foot tall, bipedal creatures that are black, brown or grayish in color. Skin said that they’ve seen the creatures three years running, each time in the fall when the family heads to the cabin to hunt for caribou.

Before that, she’d never seen anything like the Bigfoot, as she refers to the mysterious beasts, anywhere near her cabin, located about halfway between Barrow and the community of Atqasuk.

“People from a long time ago used to see them, I guess,” Skin said. “I’m 50 years old and I’ve been camping out here my whole life, and I’ve never seen anything like this, ever.”

According to Brown, another hunter had seen large man-like tracks in the dirt around the cabin earlier that day, and warned them that if they saw the bushman to “kill him dead quick.”

Numerous other unverified or unverifiable reports — as is usually the case with cryptids like Bigfoot — also exist. Perhaps the most famous of these is the story of a hunter who, in 1966, came face-to-face with a Bigfoot near a mine on Jade Mountain in Northwest Alaska.

Neelie Ravencast, who along with Tony Hernandez founded Investigation of Paranormal in Alaska (IOPIA) about 20 years ago, has long kept a database about unusual activity in the state, including Bigfoot sightings. She said that 1966 account came from a letter to John Green from a man named Bob Betts. It was recorded in 1971 in a newsletter for Bigfoot enthusiasts.

“They say a Bigfoot was killed in 1966, near the Kobuk River, in the evening,” Ravencast said. “(The miner) would often see large man-like tracks around his mine, and one day he came face-to-face with a Bigfoot.”

The account goes that the man shot the Bigfoot, but was so frightened by what he had done he cut up the body and threw it into the nearby river.

Encounter with soldiers

The Skin family account may be the northernmost reported in the state. Ravencast said that the Alaska Bigfoot loves the tundra, even though sasquatch is usually associated with heavily wooded areas like the Pacific Northwest and Northern California.

“They say that that’s where they roam, the tundra,” Ravencast said. She said that the IOPIA database contains numerous accounts of Bigfoot sightings in the tundra of Southwest Alaska.

But only one other account exists from so far north, a 1988 account recorded by IOPIA and on the website of the Bigfoot Field Researchers’ Organization, which also compiles reported sightings of the elusive creatures.

In that 1988 report, a team of “special forces” soldiers was supposedly training north of the Arctic Circle when they began to see large footprints in the snow, made by something they estimated at nine feet tall. They followed the tracks to a wooded area and heard a bellow from ahead, scaring them enough to turn around.

The Skin family’s accounts add fuel to the prospect of Arctic Bigfoot sightings. And Sarah certainly sounds convinced of what she and family have seen in recent years.

In 2010, she said one of the creatures, running on the shore, followed a boat traveling downriver for some distance before breaking off. In September 2011, she and her family spotted three “big black figures” standing on a hill on the way to the cabin from Barrow. Six hours later, the creatures were gone.

The most recent sighting came earlier this September, she said. Her sons, Joe and Edgar, were out hunting caribou when they saw one of the creatures, which they estimated at 10 feet tall.

“They saw one about a mile from my cabin, there was a big herd of caribou coming toward them and suddenly this big black creature started chasing them,” Skin said.

Damaged meat rack

She also said that her cabin has been damaged in recent years and that her meat rack, which had been “hanging sturdy” for 25 years, had been torn down “by something.”

The family hasn’t been able to compile any evidence other than eyewitness accounts, though Sarah said that she’d called the North Slope Borough and attempted to get in touch with wildlife officials about what she’d seen, but no one had gotten back to her.

“Nobody’s volunteered to help us, so it’s going to be a family effort to try and get some photographs,” Skin said.

Could there be another explanation for what the Skin family claims to have seen at their remote cabin? One possible explanation, though unlikely, could point to polar bears.

Despite their coats of white fur, polar bears have black skin underneath their coats, and adult males could grow to be 10 feet tall when standing upright. Polar bears have also been documented moving further inland from their traditional coastal territories, perhaps as a response to diminishing sea ice that makes up their habitat for much of the year.

Adding to the theory are reports earlier this year of Arctic Alaska polar bears being documented as suffering from alopecia — hair loss — and other skin ailments that could affect the coverage of their fur. That makes the possibility of spotting a largely-hairless polar bear, 30 miles inland, standing on its hind legs an almost-plausible substitute for Bigfoot.

Throwing a wrench in that theory, though, are follow-up reports that the cases of alopecia seem to have dried up as the year has worn on. And polar bears don’t run on two legs, as Skin and her family report they’ve seen the creatures doing.

Alaska has a population density of only about 1.2 people per square mile, so it’s tantalizing to think that there might be something out there in the vast wilderness that’s gone unnoticed or unrecorded for years. But until there’s some more evidence beyond the usual eyewitness accounts and undocumented encounters, the Alaska Bigfoot will remain an elusive and mysterious creature.

Steven Streufort, the owner of Bigfoot Books in Willow Creek, showed off this 18-inch-long plaster cast taken from tracks found in the forest. / Photo by Kristan Korns, Two Rivers Tribune.

By KRISTAN KORNS, Two Rivers Tribune. 14th August 2012

Tribes all along the Pacific coast, from Central California all the way up to Alaska, have shared stories about large hairy human-like creatures that live hidden in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. Steven Streufort, who runs Bigfoot Books in Willow Creek, said that European settlers arriving in the area disregarded the stories at first – until they started finding footprints and catching sight of the creature themselves. It wasn’t until the twentieth century that the local stories reached the outside world. “In the late 1950s they started to cut into a remote area of virgin timber north of Weitchpec,” Streufort said. “When they started cutting roads into there, they found footprints in the new roads.” A logging tractor driver from Salyer named Jerry Crews took pictures and made plaster casts of huge footprints at his work site near Bluff Creek. The footprints were 16 inches long. The Humboldt Times in Eureka published the pictures in October 1958, and the story was retold by newspapers around the world.

Despite the stories of Bigfoot being in the worldwide news media for over 50 years, and told throughout the Pacific Northwest for hundreds of years before that, people are reluctant to come forward with their own sightings. “They may tell you if they know you and trust you,” Streufort said, “but they don’t want to go on the record. It can damage your reputation publically.” Many well-known and respected local residents are rumored to have told close friends and relatives that they saw Bigfoot, but almost no one would talk with the TRT about their experiences. Serene White, a former legal clerk for the Hoopa Valley Tribal Court, explained why. “A lot of people keep quiet about what they’ve seen,” White said, “because they don’t want people to think they’re crazy or a liar.” She said that people have come up to her on the street, harassed her, and called her a liar. White said that she only told a few people about what she’d seen, before James “Bobo” Fay asked her if she’d retell her story for “Finding Bigfoot” on the Discovery Channel. White said that she saw a creature around midnight on August 21, 2007, not long after she returned to Hoopa after studying at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas. She was on the river bar near Chief Jackson’s, at the very north end of Hoopa near Beaver Creek, and saw something in the moonlight. “I thought it was a bear at first. It was hunched over with its hands in the water,” White said, “There was someone else there with me, but they want no part of this.” White said that she grabbed a large flashlight and pointed it at the creature. “When I turned on the light, it stood up and turned, and it made some sort of growling or crackling noise,” White said. “Have you ever seen hackles come up on a dog? That’s what it did. Then it ran off. I just watched it, sort of in pause; like shock,” she said.

Streufort said that he has heard stories like that from dozens of people living in the Klamath-Trinity area. “There’s so much unexplored forest in the Pacific Northwest that you can’t cover it all,” Streufort said, “but people have seen these creatures. Streufort said that he knows a woman who works for the fire service who has seen Bigfoot and found tracks. The woman doesn’t want to go public, he said, because she’s afraid she might lose her job. Not everyone harasses Serene White for telling her story. Privately, many people share their own stories, or their family’s stories. “About 50 people in town have talked to me about it,” White said. “It was either their experience, or their dad’s, or their great grandma’s.” White didn’t think the creature she saw was an animal. She said that it looked more like the things her elders had told her about when she was a kid. “When I was told all those stories as a kid, I thought they were just to scare kids into staying close to camp,” White said. “I didn’t think they were real.”

TV critics took on Animal Planet’s Finding Bigfoot during a contentious panel at the Television Critics Association’s semi-annual press tour in Beverly Hills on Thursday.

For those who haven’t seen the show, it’s a bit like Syfy’s Ghost Hunters, only an expert team looks for Sasquatch instead of spooks. There are interviews, data crunching, mysterious footprints and a group hunting in the woods … but no actual bigfoot.

The press tour reporters have spent nearly two weeks in a hotel interviewing actors and executives promoting TV shows. So when Animal Planet rolls out this panel the critics are, understandably, thinking: Show us bigfoot or GTFO.

A critic points out: If these guys actually find bigfoot, such huge news is not going to really stay quiet until a regular episode of Finding Bigfoot airs. One asks: Has Animal Planet run out of real animals to do shows about? Yet another wonders: First Animal Planet airs a mermaids special, now this — isn’t Animal Planet damaging its brand with this stuff?

Animal Planet’s president, Marjorie Kaplan, is good humored about the situation. “Animal Planet has many shows about animals that may be more familiar to you,” she says. “Finding Bigfoot is an exploration of the secret corners of the planet … There are places on this planet that we know about and places we don’t … New species are being found all the time.”

She also points out the network’s Mermaids: The Body Found special* got “extraordinarily” high ratings.

The Finding Bigfoot team, however, is far less amused by the critics’ skepticism. Seems there’s a lot of anecdotal evidence pointing to the existence of bigfoot and this crew are true believers. (There is more than one bigfoot, they say, and they mostly come out at night … mostly…)

“I’ve had one 15 feet away growling at me,” declares bigfoot researcher Matt Moneymaker. “So that’s why I think it’s [unfortunate] when people say they’re not real. They exist … I don’t think people realize how many witnesses there are out there … For those who don’t think these things exist, [famed primatologist] Jane Goodall thinks they exist** — and she may know a little more about it than you do.”

According to Rhettman Mullis, he and his team are the only people using a true scientific method to conduct Bigfoot research in North America. They’re working closely with Bryan Sykes, former professor of Human Genetics at University of Oxford, who is also conducting DNA research on Bigfoot hair samples at at Lausanne Museum of Zoology in Switzerland.

During his interview with George Noory on Coast to Coast AM, Mullis slipped in the following statement:

“I already know what one of the outcomes are and I’m not at liberty to discuss that. But it’s a very exciting conclusion. And so, what we’re hoping is, now that we have that answer, let’s see what Dr. Sykes comes up with and let’s see how they compare, because he’s the one that’s going to put this in the history books and put this in the biology books as fact.”

Bryan Sykes’ research project is currently in the sample submission stage. Samples may be submitted for DNA analysis, at no expense, until September. DNA analysis will be conducted during the month of November and Sykes hopes to publish results as early as December of 2012.

Sykes is well known in academic circles for his ground-breaking techniques for analyzing ancient DNA. His technique for extracting DNA from centuries-old human bones led to his theory that all Europeans are descended from seven distinct females. His book, “The Seven Daughters of Eve”, is fascinating reading and written in a style that makes it easy for anyone to read and understand.

Dr. Melba Ketchum has also been working on Bigfoot DNA research here in the United States for quite some time, and Bigfoot enthusiasts have been waiting for her to publish her peer-reviewed paper since April 2012. In an angry outburst from Ketchum which turned up on her Facebook news feed this week, Ketchum had this to say in response to an article posted by Robert Lindsay at “Bigfoot News: July 12, 2012”:

“The manuscript is NOT at the Nature Group! How many times do I have to say this? There is no pub date yet! Those pics are not real either, it looks like the hair is mounted on something fake (or tanned) and it really looks more like tanned coyote hide. The morphology is wrong for BF hair. Talk about grasping at straws. I wish people would stop bombarding me with emails every time all this fiction gets posted but that is all it is, fiction. Geez…. Ok, now that I have responded this time, this is the last post I am going to comment on the subject of this blog….and I am not going to waste my time answering any emails on it either. Just know, whatever that blog says as it pertains to ANYTHING we are doing or know, it is NOT true and I will not address this again. There are no leaks from our group and NOBODY, even the submitters, know anything at this time as the dynamics of the study have radically changed. I have way too much to do to than to answer a lot of emails. I don’t want to be rude and not answer so I am posting this as an answer to all. Please do not expect anything further until the paper is released. Thanks everyone and I appreciate the support.”

So, Dr. Ketchum says, “The dynamics of the study have radically changed”, and Rhettman Mullis says,“I already know what one of the outcomes are and I’m not at liberty to discuss that.”

So far, no one’s letting any details slip, and gossip has it that leaking information at this point will either jeopardize Ketchum’s research paper or dim the limelight she’s been basking in.

Sykes seems to have definitive milestones set up for his research project, though, something that Ketchum has never seemed to be able to do. Sykes also has the backing of a major university and museum, and a scientific research staff to keep things moving along.

The race is on. If Ketchum can’t, or won’t, publish her paper before Sykes publishes in December, she might as well hang it up. Either way, December promises to be a very interesting month for Bigfoot fans.

It is said that in this in day and age, anything is for sale. And this was no exception in Nacogdoches, Texas. Steve Busti, the owner of the Museum of the weird in Austin, Texas, paid $212 for a few strands of bigfoot Hair ( allegedly).

“i’m really looking forward to having the hairs tested” he said. If however, the tests show that they emanated from a known animal, then explaining this to his missus, will no doubt be a hair raising experience :)

Another Bigfoot encounter reported via my website. Many Thanks to Curtis Hinten for taking the time out and sending me this.

I am 55 yrs. old now but when I was in Yakima, Washington in the U.S Army we were on survival training (about 28-30 yrs. old at the time) in Yakima Valley my friend & fellow soldier were camped out by ourselves with no one else around for miles and we heard the loudest monkey like howls, grunts and screams you could ever hear. It seems as it was getting closer and closer to our tent. We locked and loaded our rifles but were scared stiff. We also smelled the terrible odor that researchers had been saying accompanied big foot. We even heard the heavy footsteps. This went on until almost morning. We were both so frightened we said if anything got to close to our tent we would fire away. In the morning we packed up and continued on with our training but did not see any prints or evidence of our nightly visitor. We told other soldiers approximately 3 days later after we had finished our training and was back with everyone else what had happened and our company 1st Sgt. stated that the most bigfoot sightings had been in yakima valley where were had been going through training. I someday want to go back to yakima valley and look for bigfoot.

Many Thanks for bigfoot-lives.com visitor Dewey Lambert for sending me his Bigfoot experience. I have included the text in it’s entirety below.

YEAR: 1994
SEASON: Fall
MONTH: September
STATE: Alabama
COUNTY: Cleburne County
LOCATION DETAILS: From I 20 you get off at the Heflin exit and go through Heflin and get on hwy 78. You will see signs directing you to Pine Glen, a camping area, and Coleman Lake soon after this point. The roads are dirt roads, but follow the signs to Pine Glen and about 3 miles up the road on the left you will see a sign for Sweetwater Lake. This road will go down about 1/2 mile to the lake.
NEAREST TOWN: Heflin
NEAREST ROAD: I 20
OBSERVED: About 7 years ago my wife and I were at a lake in the middle of the Talladega National Forrest in Alabama. The lake was sweet water lake. We were fishing in a small boat at the end of a slew early in the morning, we were the only ones at the lake, I think it was on a Wednesday and we were all alone. We heard something scream, it started out as a howl and turned into a long high pitched scream and it was so loud it echoed through the mountains. It made the hair stand up on the back of our necks. But that is not all. About a year before that My stepfather and I were hiking around the same lake, we liked to fish at a spillway way on the backside of the lake, and about 1/2 mile into the hike we crossed a fire brake about 20 feet wide, now keep in mind that we are a pretty good way back in the woods, we have crossed rocks thorns and briars and all kinds of rough ground. And right there across the dried mud in the fire brake is a set of foot prints dried into the mud. They were not huge they were about the size of a full grown man but they did look human, I just couldn’t understand why a man would be this far back in the woods without shoes on. And over the years there is one thing I have thought about a Bigfoot would have to grow up, so maybe it was a young Bigfoot
ALSO NOTICED: no
OTHER WITNESSES: Myself and my wife
OTHER STORIES: I once worked with a man in Alabama that after we became friends, told me he and his whole family were picking huckleberries at Sweetwater Lake, the huckleberries grow wild all over the area.
He and his wife and two children were picking away when they all heard something in the trees. They all turned around to see a harry man standing there. He said it was a little taller than a man and as soon as it saw them it ran off into the woods. It scared them so bad that they left.
TIME AND CONDITIONS: the scream was in the early morning and I saw the foot prints at about 10:00 or 11:00 in the day
ENVIRONMENT: It is a lake in the middle of the Talladega National Forrest. With pine and hard wood forrest around, with miles and miles of forrest between the lake and the nearest town. The name of the lake is Sweetwater Lake near Coleman Lake.
________________________________________
Follow-up investigation report:
BFRO Investigator: Tommy McElyea

I received an email recently from a vsitor to my site regarding her encounter with a Bigfoot. I have included the full text below.

In 1974 I was backpacking in the Desolation Wilderness area in California with a group of 8 hikers, I was almost 17.

The day before we arrived at the lake and almost at the end of our week long hike, I had fallen down a steep embankment and injured myself pretty badly. I had mostly large scrapes with skin missing from my elbows, shins, knees and hands. A large contusion on my forehead and generally lots of swelling everywhere. Felt like I had been hit by a truck. So, early the next morning I went down to Loon lake to bathe because I thought the cold water might help the swelling. I felt uneasy and had the sensation that I was being watched. There was an absence of noise in my general vicinity. NO birds, no nothing…

I stripped down to my underwear, naked, and proceeded to wade into the freezing water. I couldn’t help but scream and yell at the top of my lungs because of the cold water and my pain. I was in about 4 feet of water and I held my breath and went under, when I emerged I let out a huge scream. I was generally swearing loudly and splashing about like an idiot. Oblivious really to all the noise I was making. There was a large semi submerged boulder that I left my dry clothing on and as I was wading out of the lake I froze dead in my tracks, still not completely out of the water. In front of me and slightly to my right, about 50 to 100 feet away from me, standing partially obscured behind a tree was a huge hairy creature. A male, it had a large stone in it’s right hand and it banged the stone against the tree(twice) and grimaced and I could see it’s teeth. It stood at least 8 feet tall, hairy all over except for it’s face. Covered with reddish brown hair with amber colored eyes and a deep crease or scar on it’s right cheek. The skin on it’s face had a slightly red tint to it. It had no neck and a sloping forehead.

We stared at each other for what seemed like hours but in reality it was probably only like 3 minutes. My mind was racing, I was terrified. I grabbed my clothes and ran screaming back to camp, worried that it was right behind me and it was. I was screaming and leaping over rocks in my bare feet and on my way back encountered my dad who heard my screams and came running. I was in a flat out panic. My father was a big man himself, 6’6″ and weighed about 400 lbs. I knew by the look on his face that he saw something behind me because he turned so quick and I have never seen him run faster than that ever. Even though I had a head start on him, he quickly caught up with me and grabbed my right arm and shouted …”Faster!” Which only made my panic worse.

When we got back to camp, we all hurriedly packed and quickly left the area. We found another campsite further down the trail towards a dirt road and we were kept awake that night by the eery sound of a baby crying. On the hike out, me and another hiker were continually pelted with stones from the left side of the trail causing us to quicken our pace. I have never been back.

My father died 20 years ago. I think he knew that It bothered me that he never acknowledged what we saw. A few days before he died, we were talking and he said “I’m sorry…..it was right there, I Just couldn’t accept what I was seeing,…I still have a hard time…..Jan…I’m sorry…..don’t go hiking alone, okay?” I nodded. That was the only time he ever spoke about it. I remain equally horrified and fascinated by the event to this day and sometimes…I dream about it.

A new hunt is about to begin for China’s Yeti, the ‘Wild Man’ who lives in the dark forests of central Hubei province.

Standing 6 foot 8 tall and covered in dark grey hair, this Chinese incarnation of Bigfoot has been spotted hundreds of times

For centuries, the villagers who live around the Shennongjia forest of China’s central Hubei province, a forbidding 1,000 square mile reserve of high mountains and deep forests, have believed that the Wild Man, or Yeren, lives among them.

Standing 6 foot 8 tall and covered in dark grey hair, this Chinese incarnation of Bigfoot has been spotted hundreds of times.

Improbable, at least by Chinese standards, size 12 footprints have been recorded; long thick strands of hair have been tested by scientists, who proclaimed that they did not belong to any of the known creatures inside the reserve.

But no one has ever proven its existence.

This weekend however, a new team of 38 researchers drawn from several different Chinese universities and research institutes will fan out across the Shennongjia reserve on an expedition to catalogue the region’s unique ecosystem.

Their trip will continue throughout August, and the researchers will collect data on the 1,000 or so different types of animals that live in Shennongjia, including the Golden snub-nosed monkey and a white-furred bear that is only found in the reserve.

If the researchers manage to find concrete evidence of the Wild Man, they will have succeeded where two major previous expeditions, one in 1974 to 1981 and one in 2010, failed.

“I simply want to put an end to the argument that it exists,” said Wang Shancai, at the Hubei Relics and Archaeology Institute, when he set out in 2010.

In 2005, Zhang Jiahong, a shepherd in Muyu, near the forest, told the Chinese state media he had seen two of the creatures, with “hairy faces, eyes like black holes, prominent noses and dishevelled hair, with faces that resembled both a man’s and a monkey’s.

Another explorer, Zhang Jinxing, spent years living as a hermit in the Shennongjia forest, and said he had seen footprints on 19 separate occasions, without ever finding the beast.

However, Zhou Guoxing, a former director of the Beijing Museum of Natural History and a paleontologist, has poured scorn on the idea that there may be a Chinese Bigfoot.

“There is no Wild Man in this world,” he said, earlier this year.

“I’ve visited every place where the Wild Man was reported in China.

“I’ve studied everything related to the Wild Man including hair, skulls and specimens. All of them are dyed human hair or come from monkeys and bears.”

He claimed the local government in Hubei is simply trying to drum up tourist revenue. And indeed the Shennongjia Nature Reserve has recently signed agreements with Beijing to help promote package holidays to the area for nature lovers and yeti hunters.

The name of the nature reserve comes from the Emperor Shennong and the word jia, meaning ladder. The emperor was said to use the ladder to climb up the area’s mountains, and it subsequently transformed into a lush forest.